March 10, 2015 by Kat

Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe

Mary McCarthy is best-known for The Group, her outrageously candid, entertaining novel about eight Vassar graduates, class of 1933. It has the funniest scene ever about being fitted for a diaphragm.

Her bad moment came when she was learning how to insert the pessary by herself…. As she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room and hit the sterilizer. Dottie could have died.

And I have been reading McCarthy’s earlier satires, which are actually more effective than her famous women’s novel.

The Groves of Academe, a satire of an experimental college during the (Joseph) McCarthy era, is clever, polished, and surprisingly twisted. It was published in 1951.

If you expect Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or David Lodge’s Changing Places, brace yourself: the intellectual McCarthy generates a harrowing hilarity born of liberalism and her rejection of Catholicism. McCarthy, who was a member of the Partisan Review group in the 1930s and taught at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College in the 1940s, takes no prisoners in her bitter skewering of academia. Every brilliant, bitter, sinuous sentence glitters with the mix of venom, idealism, maneuvering, lying, camaraderie, hostility, and cliquishness that characterizes academic politics.

And, as if to completely discombobulate the reader, the hero is unattractive and not even sympathetic.

Henry Mulcahy, a Joyce scholar and instructor at a small “progressive” college in Pennsylvania, learns that his contract will not be renewed. It is not a good time to be a leftist: he was fired from a university in California because of his radical writings in The Nation. He was hired as an instructor at Jocelyn solely because friends called in favors to Maynard Hoar, the liberal president of the college. Hoar stood up for freedom of political beliefs; now the budget has been cut and he has decided to stand down.

Henry has a satiric view of his situation, but he knew Jocelyn was the end of the line for him and his family.

He sat down at his desk, popped a peppermint into his mouth, and began to laugh softly at the ironies of his biography: Henry Mulcahy, called Hen by his friends, forty-one years old, the only Ph.D. in the Literature department, contributor to the Nation and the Kenyon Review, Rhodes scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, father of four, fifteen years’ teaching experience, salary and rank as instructor–an “unfortunate” personality in the lexicon of department heads, but in the opinion of a number of his colleagues the cleverest man at Jocelyn and the victim, here as elsewhere, of that ferocious envy of mediocrity for excellence that is the ruling passion of all systems of jobholders.

Seeing no alternative, Hen manipulates his friends to intercede on his behalf: he says his wife Cathy has a severe heart condition and that any shock could kill her, and he implies that the FBI is out to get him and that Hoar has caved to pressure. He has a group of earnest supporters, including Domna, the youngest, most loyal member of the Literature department, and Alma Fortune, the department chair, who resigns on principle.

But when they learn that Hen has lied (Cathy was ill after her last pregnancy, but isn’t now, and Hen was never a member of the Communist party), the group is furious. Although Hen is brilliant and popular, he is a lazy teacher, he doesn’t take the tutorials seriously, and turns in his paper work late. How far must they go to protect him?

McCarthy sketches a hilarious picture of the “progressive” college. The students have tutorials instead of classes, and major in whatever they want, even if it is Broch’s The Death of Virgil and they don’t know Latin. The faculty argues over the correct spelling of “catalogue” and whether the students should have a two-week field work period in January. (The teachers go on vacation during field-work period). Then there is the never-ending poetry conference where one of the more flamboyant poets speaks on Virgil.

The majority of the students present had never heard of the person being alluded to as the Mantuan; they supposed he was a modern poet whom their faculty had not yet caught up with–a supposition correct in a sense, as Howard Furness, maliciously grinning, remarked in his slippery voice afterwards.

Mary McCarthy and Dick Cavett

I love McCarthy’s work, but she was a bit of a hellion. I remember in 1980 watching the Dick Cavett Show when she called Lillian Hellman a liar. She said, “[E]very word she [Hellman] writes is a lie, including `and’ and `the.'” Hellman sued , and the lawsuit only ended with Hellman’s death four years later. Two great underrated American women writers at each other’s throats! Tsk,tsk.

March 9, 2015 by Kat

Thomas Keneally’s Shame and the Captives

Thomas Keneally’s new novel, Shame and the Captives, is an elegantly-written, tragic exploration of the consequences of culture clash in an Australian prison-camp town during World War II.

Keneally, the winner of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in literature this year, is a consummate storyteller, a graceful stylist, and a prolific writer of more than 30 novels. He is best known for Schindler’s Ark, the winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1982, but my favorite is Woman of the Inner Sea, a story of a woman who starts a new life in the Outback as a barmaid after her children die in a fire and her wealthy philandering husband blames her.

In the introduction to Shame and the Captives, Keneally explains that his novel is “a parallel account, or a tale provoked by the events” of a violent outbreak of Japanese prisoners from a prison camp in Cowra in New South Wales in Australia in 1944. (The name Cowra is changed to Gawell in the novel.)

This dramatic character-driven novel has a huge cast. It begins with twenty-three-year-old Alice Herman, whose husband Neville has been a prisoner in Austria for two years. She leads an uneventful life on her father-in-law’s farm. When a truck drops off some Japanese prisoners to work on the road, she is excited and curious. She makes lemonade for them, and hopes some woman will be similarly kind to Neville in his prison.

Back to the kitchen she raced and fetched from a box by the dresser the remaining leftover lemons from the two trees in the informal orchard beyond th back gate. She began to slice the fruit, squeeze it out, pour the juice into jugs, go to the ice chest, chip ice off the ice blocks, put it all in the jug, mix in sugar–a reckless amount of her ration–add water from the kitchen tap with tank wigglers in it, and stir it all up. She did not want her father-in-law to come in and see her behaving like this, so it must be done briskly.

The theme of shame is explored throughout the novel. Alice is desperate, sexually-starved, and angry because she barely knew her husband before he was captured in the war. When an Italian prisoner, Giancarlo Molisano, comes to live and work on the Hermans’ farm, Alice initiates sex with him. Later, when he indicates his reluctance to continue the affair because of his loyalty to her father-in-law, she is angry, and it is clear that he is her captive.

The prison camp holds Japanese, Italians, and Koreans. Tengan, a young Japanese pilot with long lashes and wide-set eyes, is so ashamed of having been captured that he dreams of killing the guards and then committing suicide. He is one of the leaders in the camp. Many of the Japanese prisoners would rather be presumed dead than captured, and hence fail to reply to their relatives’ letters. Sakura, a professional female impersonator, shares their belief in the shame of captivity: when the time comes for suicide, she will don an appropriate costume.

The officers at the camp have deceptively simple lives. Major Bernard Suttor, the commander of Compound C, spends his free time writing his popular comic radio serial, The Mortons of Gundahah. which also distracts him from fear for his son, a prisoner in China. Old-world courtesy causes the stodgy Colonel Ewan Abercare to make a decision with fatal consequences for more than 200 people. Corporal Headon, an eccentric Great War veteran, is in charge of Machine Gun A, and his devotion to following the rules seems absurd until it becomes essential.

The novel does ramble a bit–there are just too many characters– but the plotting of the Japanese prisoner’s outbreak is razor-sharp.

There is no subtext: this is a gracefully-written, disturbing page-turner. It is a good historical novel based on real events. If you like that kind of thing, you’ll like it.

Not my favorite, but it is very good.

March 6, 2015 by Kat

E. Nesbit’s The Lark

Frontispiece by H. R. Millar to E. Nesbit’s “The Enchanted Castle”

E. Nesbit was my favorite writer as a child, and my favorite book was The Enchanted Castle.

One of the pleasures of having an e-reader has been discovering Nesbit’s out-of-print adult books.

I just finished The Lark, a delightful comedy published in 1922.

In The Lark, Nesbit’s last book, she immediately establishes a quasi-magical atmosphere reminiscent of her charming children’s novels. She combines witty dialogue with comic sketches of work and dreamy descriptions of gardens in this compelling story of two young women struggling to make a living selling flowers from their garden.

E. Nesbit

The main characters, both orphans, Jane Quested and her cousin, Lucilla, are 15 and visiting their friend Emmeline when we meet them in the opening chapter. In the library they find a spell book, a “fat quarto volume with onyx-laid clasps and bosses,” and the adventurous Jane decides it will be “a lark” to try the spell that will reveal her true love. (Everything is a lark to Jane.)

The novel is also a comic riff on the romance between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Jane is looking lovely and saying her spell in the woods when Mr. Rochester, a handsome man who has missed his train, wanders by. Their eyes meet.

Will Jane see him again? Yes, a few years later, when Jane and Lucilla’s guardian loses their money and flees to South Africa, he arranges for them to be picked up from school and taken in a cab to a tiny charming cottage that is the last of their inheritance. They begin to sell flowers from their garden, because it is all they can think of to do.

Before I go on, I must fill you in on E. Nesbit’s background and fame as a children’s writer. Her adult books are little-known.

In 1963, Gore Vidal wrote an article, “The Writing of E. Nesbit,” for The New York Review of Books:

After Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit is the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children (neither wrote for children) and like Carroll she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own. Yet Nesbit’s books are relatively unknown in the United States. Publishers attribute her failure in these parts to a witty and intelligent prose style (something of a demerit in the land of the free) and to the fact that a good many of her books deal with magic, a taboo subject nowadays.

Edith and her husband, Hubert Bland, were socialists and members of the Fabian Society. To support her husband and five children, Nesbit wrote children’s books. She also supported her best friend, Alice, who had an affair with Hubert, had two children by him, and became Edith’s housekeeper and secretary. A. S. Byatt’s wonderful novel, The Children’s Book, is based on E. Nesbit and her circle.

In The Lark, Jane and Lucilla have sold most of the flowers from their own garden, and wish they could rent the deserted house with a huge garden down the road. When they find the door open one day and decide to explore, Jane falls and turns her ankle. Mr. Rochester, who is the landlord’s nephew, shows up and take the two girls home in his carriage. He is smitten with Jane (but we knew that) and arranges for his cranky uncle to allow them to sell the flowers from his garden. They open a shop in a shed, hire a gardener, and eventually are given the use of his house, where they take in lodgers (which is very, very funny).

One of the things I like most about the book is the young women’s inability to do math. (That’s why I can’t open a bookstore.)

“It’s so different doing it with real money,” said Lucilla, fingering the little piles of coin on the table of the garden room, where, with two candles in brass candlesticks to light them, they were seeking to find some relation between the coins–so easily counted–and the figures referring to these same coins which all through the week they had laboriously pencilled in an exercise-book.

“I think it’s the garden distracts us,” said Jane, looking towards the open window, beyond which lay lawn and cedars bathed in moonlight and soft spring air.

I adored this book. It is utterly charming, if a little rambling with its authorial asides (which I loved) and occasional slapstick scenes. But I love novels about work, and though this isn’t entirely realistic–could someone please give me a garden?–I love the characters, appreciate the poetic descriptions of flowers, and the burglar episode reminds me of her Bastable books.

Alas, it is only available in the Delphi Classics e-book, The Complete Novels of E. Nesbit. This only costs a couple of dollars, and I urge you to try it if you are a Nesbit fan. The Lark seems a perfect book for a print publisher to revive.

The e-reader certainly has its uses!

March 5, 2015 by Kat

Junked Garage! Or the Wreck of the Linden

On June 17, 2014, a storm with 70-mile-per-hour winds blasted through our city. It ripped up a linden tree and pitched it on top of our garage.

Our back yard looks magical, doesn’t it? All that pretty green. But there is a scrunched garage beneath it.

We wandered outside bleary-eyed. No power. No coffee. No, no, no. Nothing.

I couldn’t face reality. I rushed to the coffeehouse. “Two Epic Sumatras please.”

We sat down and waited for the tree guys.

They worked hard and fast in an emergency.

Trees were down all over the city, but our wrecked garage was voted “worst of the month” by the insurance inspector.

When the tree guys heard another tree creaking across the street, they cut it down gratis. They were like firemen.

We had to look at the garage whenever we sat in the back yard all summer. I stopped sitting in the back yard.

The garage contractors finally demolished and removed the remains in August.

They began building the new garage in mid-October.

It was a very cold end of October when they finished.

Climate change, my dears.

We feel much better now that the garage is built.

And to quote R.E.M.’s “Half a World Away”:

Oh, this lonely world is wasted
Pathetic eyes, high-alive
Blind eye that turns to see
The storm it came up strong
It shook the trees and blew away our fear
I couldn’t leave it here
To go it alone, hold it along
Haul it along and hold it
Go it alone hold it along
Hold

And here’s the video:

March 3, 2015 by Kat

Bookmarks & Over Book-Budget!

I was very grateful to the friend who sent me these three lovely floral-design bookmarks.

I don’t know about you, but I use a lot of bookmarks. In fact, I never throw one away. I have that multiple-reading thing going: right now I am reading Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl (with a Book Depository bookmark), Leonard Woolf’s Beginning Again (with a Planned Parenthood Book Sale bookmark), and Galsworthy’s To Let (with a City Lights bookmark).

I collect free bookmarks wherever I go.

Like you, I have amassed bookmarks from Borders, The Book Depository, B&N, and Amazon. I have garnered free bookmarks from Prairie Lights in Iowa City, The Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City, The Ruminator (a defunct bookstore ) in St. Paul, The Bookworm in Omaha, Skoob in London, Howards Books (now defunct) in Bloomington, The National Gallery in D.C., The Dickens Museum in London, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, etc., etc..

A friend of mine in North Carolina once sent me a bookmark autographed by a favorite author who happened to be reading in her town.

Shouldn’t there be a bookmark swap website? Is there a National Bookmark Month? Do you like bookmarks as much as I do?

Over Budget!!! Everyone fusses about how they must stop buying books.

I am one of them.

I am way over-budget.

My extraordinary collection of boxes.

See this extraordinary collection of boxes? Yes, there are books in them.

Instead of going to London or touring the UNESCO Cities of Literature, I decided to take a Reading Vacation this year.

I know, right? It was what I wanted to do.

And then I Did the Thing. I bought the Folio Society’s new expanded edition of Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (the complete text: four volumes instead of three).

Consider it a hypomanic moment.

I was curious about the complete text of The Duke’s Children (the last book in the Palliser series, which I am rereading).

The Folio Society edition of The Duke’s Children

And the next thing I knew I was at the Folio Society website and it was in my shopping cart. I think I am now a member of the Folio Society.

Good God!

It’s a Lucy moment.

I can never possibly tell my husband, Ricardo.

Oh, well, maybe I can persuade a bunch of friends to go in on it with me, the way we did with Abbey Road.

Or sell it when I’m done for a profit at e-bay.

Thank God you can wear rags when you ride a bicycle.

March 3, 2015 by Kat

Postettes: Turgenev’s Virgin Soil & T. H. White’s The Goshawk

Turgenev Manor House

I cannot write at length about every book I read, so here are quick “postettes” on two of the most brilliant books I’ve read this year, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and T. H. White’s The Goshawk.

Turgenev’s Virgin Soil. I have a passion for 19th-century Russian writers. Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy…

But if I had an opportunity to meet one, I would choose Turgenev. This charming writer of lyrical, philosophical novels sounds more down-to-earth than the others. If I visited him in Baden-Baden, one of his favorite cities (he preferred Europe to Russia), I could wear preppy L. L. Bean or slightly hippieish J. Jill rather than the sackcloth and ashes Tolstoy went in for.

Turgenev’s most famous novel is Fathers and Sons, a powerful story of two young nihilists, the gentle Arkady and the scientific Bazarov, and the divergence of politics between different generations.

Virgin Soil, Turgenev’s last novel, is also a masterpiece. I recently read Constance Garnett’s graceful translation in the NYRB edition.

In this little-known classic, Turgenev depicts the lives of idealistic Russian revolutionaries of the late 1860s and 1870s. The radical movement, known as populism, brought together young educated Russians with the peasants as they sought to eradicate the class difference.

The moody hero, Nezhdanov, is the bastard son of an aristocrat, and is involved in a revolutionary group in St. Petersburg. Depressed and disillusioned, he takes a job as a tutor in the country. He soon grows to despise his upper-class employers, despite the vivacity of the mistress of the house, Valentina Mihalovna. And then he falls in love with their niece, Marianna, a passionate young populist. The two young people want to make contact with the peasants, but Nezhdavov simply cannot communicate with them. Marianna remains enthusiastic, especially after they befriend a radical factory manager. Other revolutionaries include a rash upper-class man who acts too precipitately and a lonely man who becomes a traitor by talking too much. The novel combines action with philosophy and politics.

Sounds a bit like the politics of the 1960s, doesn’t it?

T. H. White’s The Goshawk. I read this only because I have read so much about Helen Macdonald’s Costa Award-winning H Is for Hawk, her memoir of training a goshawk. She was inspired partly by White’s book.

The Goshawk is the story of White’s adventures in falconry, focusing on his training of a goshawk, the wildest of all hawks.

He ordered the bird from Germany.. It arrived terrified in a basket. White named it Gos.

T. S. White: I’m not sure what the birds are.

Although the writing is extraordinarily graceful, at first White’s account of the cruel training of Gos nauseated me. Only the splendid writing kept me going. White learned about falconry from a book published in the Renaissance. Keeping the bird awake for three to nine days until he took food from his trainer’s hand was considered more effectual than any other method. The trainer also had to keep awake.

White explains,

In teaching a hawk it was useless to bludgeon the creature into submission. The raptors had no tradition of masochism, and the more one menaced or tortured them, the more they menaced in return. Wild and intransigent, it was yet necessary to “break” them somehow or other, before they could be tamed and taught. Any cruelty, being immediately resented, was worse than useless, because the bird would never bend or break to it. He possessed the last inviolable sanctuary of death. The mishandled raptor chose to die.

After White got beyond the initial stages, I became fascinated. He also discusses humane shortcuts he learned after going by the book.

He fascinatingly describes the many pitfalls in the man-bird relationship. It was one step forward, two steps back. White truly loved Gos, but Gos needed wildness. It was who Gos was.

Animal stories are always sad, are they not? This is no exception.

White is so elegant a writer, and the book is so perfectly-written that I did not take notes in it at all. And that’s a tribute to this great classic.

March 1, 2015 by Kat

Jonathan Lethem’s Lucky Alan and Other Stories

I have read some remarkable collections of short stories this year.

The best is Jonathan Lethem’s Lucky Alan and Other Stories.

Readers of this blog will know that Lethem is my favorite American writer. His genre-bending fiction ranges from realism to realism laced with magic realism to science fiction and noir. And he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999 for Motherless Brooklyn, a novel about a detective with Tourette syndrome.

I read these brilliant stories in one sitting. In my favorite story, “Lucky Alan,” the narrator, Grahame, an actor, goes every day to the movies, where he keeps running into Blondy Sigmund, the “legendary” theater director. Sometimes they go to wine bars after the film, sometimes months go by without their seeing each other. When Grahame realizes that Blondy has left the neighborhood, he tracks him down. Blondy tells the story of why he left his rent-controlled apartment, which centers on a geeky neighbor named Alan.

Lethem’s flamboyant writing is laced with buoyant humor. Here is a quote from “Lucky Alan.”

If this multiplex-haunting practice didn’t square with Blondy’s reputation as the venerated maestro of a certain form of miniaturist spectacle (Krapp’s Last Tape in the elevator of a prewar office building, which moved up and down throughout the performance, with Blondy himself as Krapp, for cramped audiences of five or six at a time, it didn’t matter, since that reputation hardly thrived.

Some of his stories verge on absurdity. In the hilarious story, “The King of Sentences,” two pretentious bookstore clerks (who snub their customers, as bookstore clerks do everywhere) try to write perfect sentences and stalk a reclusive writer they call the King of Sentences.

In “Traveler Home,” a kind of dark fairy tale, Traveler, who has moved to the country from the city, waits for the Plowman to dig him out of a snowstorm. He hears wolves howl, and finds a baby in the woods. Is this somehow related to the Plowman’s eccentric,, slightly witchy daughter?

Jonathan Lethem

One of my favorites is “The Empty Room,” in which the volatile father of an eccentric family insists that one room in their big house be designated “the empty room.” It becomes a running joke, and the kids’ friends like to visit it after school. The empty room has a sign-up sheet, but gradually splits the parents as they pursue divergent interests..

“The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear” is a clever horror story about a psycho blogger. Oh, dear, why don’t writers like bloggers?! Lethem writes: “It was the Whom I tried to keep out and the Whom I laid low with a single remorseless thrust with the blunt editorial object I had carried with me hidden on my person and with which, gripped knuckle-tight, I lay in wait inside the entranceway of my blog.” I’m sure non-bloggers will appreciate this one more than I did.

“Procedure in Plain Air” is a surreal masterpiece. The umemployed Stevick, whose excellent severance package has slowed his job hunt, is drinking coffee on a bench when two men in jumpsuits jump out of a truck, dig a hole, and lower a bound-and-gagged man in a jumpsuit into it. When the men get ready to go, Stevick complains that the boards over the hole won’t keep the rain out, and is handed an umbrella.

All of these stories are excellent, and a good introduction to Lethem’s work if you don’t know it.

February 26, 2015 by Kat

The TLS, The Last Trojan Hero, & Adventures in Stationery

I have just renewed my subscription to the TLS,.

It is a guilty pleasure: I end up buying many scholarly books on classics reviewed in this publication.

Right now I am finishing up Philip Hardie’s The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, an entertaining overview of Virgil’s influence on literary works ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Michel Butor’s nouveau roman, La Modification (which my husband has promised to translate–we’ll see!).

But even the TLS has its lighter side. I enjoyed Catharine Morris’s recent review of James Ward’s Adventures in Stationery: A Journey through Your Pencil Case. Are you as enchanted by stationery as I am? I have added this book to my TBR list. (By the way, Ward has a blog called I Like Boring Things.)

Morris’s review is filled with charming quotes. Ward writes, “It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the history of stationery is the history of human civilization.”

And I also like this.

The physical means something,” writes Ward. “People like it.” You can’t beat a handwritten letter, it’s true; and, as Ward points out, the materials we use have symbolic power: “Visiting a stationery store, you are surrounded by potential; it’s a way of becoming a new person, a better person.”

Few write letters, but I do correspond with a few old-fashioned friends. Before the stationery store in town closed, I stocked up on stationery, fountain pens, and Apica notebooks. I also adore going to office supply stores on New Year’s Day. My favorite episode of The Gilmore Girls is “Help Wanted,” when Lorelai and her father, Richard, stock up on post-its at an office supply store. And of course The Office is set in a corporate paper supply business.

Did you know there is a blog called Letters of Note?

If you want to read some Roman classics, try Cicero’s Letters, Pliny’s letters, and Seneca’s letters.

I am fond of Fanny Burney’s Evelina, the letters in Ausen’s novels (I especially like Lydia’s in Pride and Prejudice), Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross, Cathleen Schine’s The Love Letter, and there’s a lot of e-mail in Gary Shteyngart’s comic masterpiece, Super Sad True Love Story.

And then there is all that correspondence by favorite authors, Keats, Emily Dickenson, Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, etc.

What are your favorite books on/with letters?

February 24, 2015 by Kat

Why We Don’t Want to Be Characters in Other People’s Books

Doris Lessing and Jenny Diski

Someone kindly gave me a subscription to the London Review of Books this year.

It is a very male-oriented publication. I read an appallingly misogynistic article about Hillary Clinton. (They might respect her if they did not call her “Hillary.”) But I have read with great interest Jenny Diski’s column, particularly her memoirs of Doris Lessing.

Diski, a brilliant memoirist and novelist, lived with Doris Lessing for several months in 1963 after she was expelled from boarding school. There were good times and bad times–she met many famous writers–but how did she know Doris would not kick her out? Everyone else did.

Eleven years later, Diski had the disconcerting experience of finding herself a character in Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.

Let me say here that Lessing is my favorite writer. The Golden Notebook and the Martha Quest books influenced the course of my life. These books are oxygen to me. I also love her dystopian fable, The Memoirs of a Survivor.

In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the narrator describes the disintegration of society by food shortages and power outages. The “memoir” describes a future of regression and barbarism, but it is also a reminder of techniques of off-the-grid survival. (Gangs, barter, and flea markets are important.) The future may be most difficult for those of us who remember civilization, Lessing hints.

I also read Memoirs as Lessing’s psychological memoir, and the character Emily as a doppelganger of the narrator’s younger self.

Diski says Emily is based on her..

Diski writes,

Memoirs of a Survivor was published in 1974, 11 years after I began to live with Doris. She gave me a copy of the novel, as she did every one she wrote. It was inscribed ‘To Jenny love Doris 25/11/74’. It made familiar and disturbing reading. I could see Emily in me, just as I could see my elderly neighbour’s description of me aged three. It is as accurate a reading of me as Emily’s harsh commentary on others. It is true, but it is, of course, a doubly edited version, a view of me from the narrator’s point of view, which itself has been taken and worked for fiction’s purpose from Doris’s point of view. If there is pity in the narrator’s response to Emily, it is strained for. I discovered after a while that Doris had a habit of describing people in fiction and in life as, for example, ‘heartbreaking’ in her most distant, coolest tone, as if to mitigate her dislike of them. She saw it as being fair, I think.

The truth of the matter is, no one wants to be a character in someone else’s novel. I do feel sympathy for Diski, who was hurt by Lessing’s portrayal. But perhaps Lessing was also writing about herself as Emily. And I myself thought the portrait of Emily was compassionate.

Living with Lessing sounds relatively heavenly to me. When I was a teenager, a lesbian teacher installed me in her house and seduced me. I was always having to pretend I was 18 so she wouldn’t be arrested. When I moved out, she stood on the curb outside the house where I had a room and yelled, “I hope it hurts like hell when you screw.”

There are observant writers; there are distorting writers. There are kind writers; there are sociopathic writers.

Of course I’m fascinated by Diski’s memoirs (I loved Skating to Antarctica), but Lessing’s are more fascinating. I look forward to the third volume of Lessing’s autobiography, if she ever wrote it and if it is published.

Doris Lessing

February 23, 2015 by Kat

Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse

I have been meaning to read Brian Aldiss’s science fiction since I read his introduction to the American paperback edition of Anna Kavan’s surreal apocalyptic novel, Ice. It is the best piece on Kavan I’ve ever read.

Aldiss thought Ice was the best science fiction novel of 1967. When he wrote Kavan a letter praising it, they arranged to meet. She said she was not familiar with SF, nor had she intended write science fiction, but was fascinated by his precis of trends in speculative fiction and liked the idea of being part of an up-and-coming genre.

Aldiss is the author of Hothouse, a modernist SF novel in which the earth has heated up of instead of cooled down. In Hothouse, first published in 1961 and reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2008, human beings are determined to survive on a future earth, though they are threatened by lush man-eating vegetation. Aldiss’s gift for brilliant, gorgeous, rhythmic language makes this novel a classic.

In the distant future, the sun is burning out. The cities are long gone, and the few humans left live in small tribes in trees. In the first chapter, the child Clat is killed by a trappersnapper, which senses its prey through a layer of foliage and is in essence a pair of a pair of square jaws with teeth.

There are many characters, but Aldiss focuses on Gren, an intelligent young man treasured as one of the very few males of the species. Nevertheless, he is banished by the tribe leader for disobeying orders and exploring on his own; luckily, he is joined by Yattmur, a woman from another tribe.

Vegetation ironically is more intelligent than humans. A morel plops on Gren’s head and invades his brain, mining his race memories to learn the history of earth. Gren and Yattmur are enslaved by the morel’s need to know and his dependence on Gren. They escape a hostile jungle in a boat with people called the tummy-belly men, who were attached to the intelligent Tummy trees by tails until Gren cuts their tails. The boats take them to an islet, where they live happily until the morel presses them to travel by huge plants called Stalkers that take them to the dark side of the world.

Aldiss’s descriptions of the vegetation are almost visionary and psychedelic. Here is a description of three threatening trees.

Standing apart from all other vegetation, the trees bore a resemblance to giant pineapples. A collar of spiny leaves projected outwards directed from the ground, protecting the central fleshy trunk, which in each of the three cases was swollen into a massive knobbly ovoid. From the knobs of the ovoid sprouted long trailers; from the top of the ovoid sprouted more leaves, spiny and sharp, extending some two hundred feet into the air, or hanging stiffly out over Long Water.

We also follow the aging tribe leader, Lily-Yo, who realizes she has lost her youth and must Go Up. And so she and the older members of the tribe attach themselves in pods to a plant called the traverser, which takes them to the moon. (They had no idea what their destination was.)

I loved this book and look forward to reading more Aldiss: in his introduction to Kavan he compares Ice to his novel, Report on Probability A. I’ll have to look for that.

And here’s a wacky picture of a cover of a pulp paperback edition:

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